The Revolt of 1857

There was a significant threat to British rule in India, when a number of
Indian soldiers of the British Indian army rose in revolt in 1857 against
their officers, and against the colonial regime in general. This revolt of
the soldiers struck a sympathetic chord among many people who had their own

Any revolt of significance usually has a number of causes which
fester for a number of years, yet there is that final spark that launches it.
In the case of the 1857 Revolt, that spark came as the episode of greased
cartridges.

reasons to be dissatisfied with the British rule. The Revolt of 1857 is a
significant event in modern Indian history. The British took serious
note of it, and considerably changed their policies in the wake of the Revolt.
Some of the members of the ruling colonial elite chose to ignore the popular
character of the revolt and labeled it merely as a 'sepoy mutiny.'
Nationalist elite, which took shape in the last
two decades of the nineteenth century to lead a successful anti-colonial
political campaign, glorified it as the 'first war of Indian independence.'
Memories of the Revolt had lain deep in the awareness of both colonial
rulers and the Indian subjects.

British rule in India, which can be said to have come into being
after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, was initially established in Bengal and
then gradually spread to other regions. Being economically exploitative
and destructive of the social fabric, it encountered resistance right from the
beginning. There were innumerable peasant revolts which broke out in
different parts of the country, some of the prominent ones being the
Kol Uprising of 1831, the Santhal Uprising of 1855, and the Kutch Rebellion
which lasted from 1816 until 1832. Dissatisfaction among the Indian soldiers
of the British Indian army also had some history. Indian soldiers had
grievances on economic, social and religious grounds. A significant mutiny to
happen before the 1857 Revolt was the
Vellore (Tamil Nadu, South India) Mutiny of 1806 which was brutally
crushed by British officers and soldiers. Ever since the Vellore Mutiny,
unofficial political committees of soldiers were a regular feature of
army life in India.

As already noted, 1857 Revolt consisted both of rebellion by the
sepoys or soldiers and reaction from sections of the general Indian
population. Peasants were an important segment of Indian society.
Uprising among the sepoys and peasants was even more
directly related in that the sepoys were, in their origins, peasants with close
ties with their kinspeople in the villages. Many of the sepoys came
from Awadh, a region currently incorporated in the Indian state of Uttar
Pradesh, a region that also saw massive peasant uprisings. Awadh, one of
the main centers of the Revolt, was annexed by Lord Dalhousie,
Governor General of India, in 1856. The British removed talukdars,
traditional landowners of the region, promising a better deal for the peasants.
But in reality, condition of the peasants only got worse. Heavy overassessment
of land revenue impoverished them. While talukdars appropriated the surplus
peasants produced, they were limited and constrained by the relations of
mutual interdependence between the Raja
and the peasant and the traditional worldview of social norms and obligations.
British conquest assaulted this traditional worldview, and removal of the
king had an emotional impact on the people of Awadh.

Awadh was only one of the regions where the Revolt took place.
Other areas affected by the Revolt were Rohilkhand, Bundelkhand, parts of
Bihar, parts of Punjab, and Central India. While northern, eastern and central
regions of the country were affected by the
Revolt, western and southern regions remained more or less aloof. The
storm centers of the Revolt were Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Bareilly and Jhansi.
Bakht Khan was the rebel leader in Delhi and he took the fight to Lucknow.
In Kanpur, Nana Sahib, adopted son of
Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa of the Maratha kingdom, led the Revolt. The
British had earlier refused to recognize Nana Sahib as the legitimate
successor of the Peshwas. Tantia Tope, one of the loyal followers of
Nana Sahib, is remembered for his valiant fight
against the British. Revolt at Lucknow was led by the Begum of Awadh
who proclaimed her young son Nawab. Young Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi
joined the Revolt when the
British refused to acknowledge her right to adopt an heir to the deceased
local king. Kunwar Singh, a ruined and discontented zamindar near Arrah in
the state of Bihar, was the chief organizer of the Revolt in the area.
The Revolt carried on as late as 1859 in some instances before it
was finally crushed. A number of these heroes and heroines of the Revolt
have been immortalized through the folklorization of their valiant battles
in modern and contemporary India.

Any revolt of significance usually has a number of causes which
fester for a number of years, yet there is that final spark that launches it.
In the case of the 1857 Revolt, that spark came as the episode of greased
cartridges. The grease of the cartridges, whose end had to be bitten off
before loading in the newly introduced Enfield rifle, was sometimes
made from beef or pig fat, types of meat taboo to Hindus and Muslims
respectively. Introduction of the new cartridges hurt the religious sentiments
of the soldiers and made them suspect that the government was trying to
destroy their religion. While this might have been the immediate spark,
suspicion that the new government was out to destroy
their religion and caste had plagued the Indian people for a long time.
The government had undertaken some aggressive social reform measures
in the first half of the 19th century. There were also numerous endeavors
by the missionaries to spread Christianity
in India, which the government did not seriously discourage.

A number of Muslim revivalist groups, Wahabis in particular,
played an important role in the Revolt. Tipu Sultan of Mysore was
well-known for his opposition to the British rule. Faraizis, a revivalist
movement founded in Bengal in 1804, united the peasantry
against the exactions of the new zamindars in the name of resuscitated faith.
According to the traditional Muslim perspective, the whole land, from
Delhi to Calcutta, had passed into the possession of the
'Nasranis' (the British), and India ceased to be the 'land of
Islam'. It was henceforth considered 'enemy territory'. It was incumbent
upon Muslims to wage a jihad or holy war against the British or migrate
to some free Muslim country. There was broad unity among different
sections of the Muslim community -- expropriated aristocrats, ruined
handicraftsmen, frustrated Ulema and discontented
soldiers -- in the sentiment against the British rule. The Wahabis enjoyed
the backing of a network of organized centers spread all over northern India
and moral influence over Muslim intelligentsia in the entire country. In the
1840s, Wahabi leaders formed contacts with unofficial political committees
of soldiers in the British Indian army, and introduced
to them techniques of conspiratorial work through a chain of hospices and
secret agents. It was out of such traditions and contacts that elected
committees of soldiers emerged in Delhi and Lucknow in 1857 which virtually
took over the government. In the post-Mutiny period, belief about Muslim
responsibility for the Revolt was so strong among the British officials
that Sayyid Ahmed Khan had to wage active and incessant efforts to rescue
Muslims of the stigma of disloyalty.

Hindus and Muslims united in their opposition to the British. The
rebel government of Bakht Khan in Delhi abolished taxes on articles of
common consumption, penalized hoarding, and as a gesture of goodwill
to the Hindus, banned cow slaughter. Hindu rebel leaders reciprocated by
accepting the proclamation of Bahadur Shah as the symbolic head
of the rebel government and by maintaining all the Mughal state symbols.
The emphasis was on pre-British Hindu-Muslim coexistence within the
Mughal imperial framework. Bahadur Shah's proclamation emphasized
the standards of both Muhammad and Mahavir. One group which kept
away from trouble and opposition to the British was the
English-educated Bengali intelligentsia. This group owed its ascendancy
to conditions of the new rule, and some of its members were descendants
of the new Bengali zamindars, a class of upstarts created by the Permanent
Settlement in Bengal. It is curious to note that
some members of this elite group would turn against the British later,
thirty or forty years after the 1857 Revolt.

1857 Revolt was not a class revolt, as peasantry did not rebel
against the landlords. Peasantry mainly directed attacks against
money-lending grain dealers or the representatives / emblems of the
British Indian government. British policies alienated
aristocracy, priesthood as well as peasant proprietary classes. Rural
magnates, or the landowning class of leadership, strongly influenced
how any particular region as a whole was going to react. The Revolt,
in Awadh as well as in other regions, was popular, in that
it pertained to people as a whole and was carried out by them.
Talukdars and peasants in Awadh fought together against a common
foe. While we speak of the Revolt of 1857 as
one revolt for reasons of simplicity, in actuality it was not one
movement but many. The lineaments of the Revolt differed vastly from
district to district, and even village to village. Variability of the Revolt
was determined by the local specifics of ecology,
tenurial forms, and variable impact of the colonial rule.

Marx was the earliest commentator to recognize the 'national'
character of the 1857 Revolt. Writing in 1857 itself, he commented that
the British in creating a native army had simultaneously organized
the "first general centre of resistance which the Indian
people was ever possessed of." He also noted that Muslims and Hindus
had combined against their common masters by renouncing their
mutual antipathies. Noting the sense of outrage in the British press
regarding the atrocities committed by the Indian sepoys, Marx
said that their conduct was only a reaction in a concentrated form
to England's own record in India during the foundation of the empire
and after. It was a kind of historical retribution. He noted the deliberate
exaggeration of the outrages by Indians, while the
English cruelties were related as acts of martial vigor.

Strictly speaking, Revolt of 1857 cannot be described 'national',
for national would entail a reaction to colonial rule in modernist terms.
Rebels of 1857 did not have that modernist vision. They did not fully
comprehend the nature the new regime that overwhelmed India. They
did not have a viable alternative program of action in the case
of overthrow of the colonial regime. This lack of vision can be said to
be the main reason for their defeat. But the Revolt can be described
'national' in another important sense. This was the first time that soldiers
of the Indian army recruited from different communities, Hindus and
Muslims, landlords and peasants, had come together for the
first time in their opposition to the British. While unity in the above terms
was not adequate to the task of overthrow of British rule, it certainly
provided the necessary foundation that the later successful anti-colonial
struggles could build upon.

References.

Chandra, Bipan. Modern India. Delhi, 1976.

Joshi, P.C. (Ed)- Rebellion 1857: A Symposium. New Delhi, 1957.

Marx, Karl and F. Engels, The First Indian War of
Independence, 1857-1859. Moscow, 1959.

Mukherjee, Rudrangshu. Awadh in Revolt 1857-1858: A Study in Popular
Resistance. Delhi, 1984.

Stokes, Eric. The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of
1857. Oxford, 1986.